Dead streetlights. Empty driveways. He saw a woman’s body slumped across a car bonnet; the dark stains that had leaked from her and pooled in clotted slicks. She had been opened up and emptied out. He kept moving. He walked past something that looked like moulted skin, sloughed off by some unknown thing. He prodded it with a foot, disgusted and intrigued.
He heard a car engine from the next street. He stopped. Brakes shrieking. Tyres scraping on the road. The crash of metal against something heavier and immovable. A scream cleaved the night.
Frank ran towards the scream, resisting the temptation to run the other way. He rounded the corner and stopped. He panted, his shoulders moving with each breath he gave and took.
A car had crashed into a stone wall outside a house. People were inside the car. There was an excited screech from nearby. He swallowed to wet his throat.
There was a man in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel. A woman was in the front passenger seat, crying between her screams. A girl sat in the back, stunned and reeling.
An old man pulled open the driver’s door and dragged out the man. The woman screamed again, made a futile effort to stop him being pulled outside.
The old man laid out the driver and knelt over him.
“Hey,” Frank shouted.
The old man turned. His body was misshapen, his bones jutting from under his clothes. He was shaking like an addict. Frank halted.
The old man’s face was blank, almost moronic. Sunken eyes. He turned back to the unconscious man and bent his head towards the man’s face. There was a wet scraping sound. He looked like he was kissing the man, his back arching as he bobbed his head to batten onto the younger man’s face.
The woman screamed when she saw what the old man was doing.
Frank stumbled over to the old man and hit him on the back with the crowbar. The old man came free from his victim with a moist rip and turned, a wheezing rattle coming from his open mouth. He had no teeth. On his neck, flaps of skin parted bloodlessly to reveal a nest of black tendrils no longer and thicker than shoelaces. The tendrils stretched and lunged at the air, wanting to envelop Frank’s face and squirm into his mouth. Frank smashed the old man’s face with the crowbar; he collapsed, as did his skull. The tendrils danced erratically, even as the old man stopped moving, his face a desiccated mask. His eyes had caved in and his nose was all bent cartilage and crumbling bone.
The tendrils flopped wetly onto the old man’s chest, like something washed up on a beach. Frank stepped away, repulsed.
The woman was still screaming. The girl stared at Frank, her palm pressed against the window.
Frank ran to the car, opened the back door. “Come on, get out.”
“That was Mr. Stewart,” she said. She had red hair, and he had a sudden image of another girl with red hair. A girl he loved.
On the other side of the car, two men had opened the woman’s door and grabbed her. There was something wrong with the men’s faces and their hands. They ripped the woman from her seat just as Frank pulled the girl from the car. She didn’t fight him. She only looked back at the car and called for her mother.
The woman screamed. The men piled upon her. The sounds of paper being torn, but it wasn’t paper. She stopped screaming.
“We can’t help her,” Frank told the girl as he led her away. “I’m sorry.”
Frank looked down at the man, whose mouth was too wide and bloody for him to be alive. His eyes were open. He must have awoken when the tendrils invaded him. His teeth were stained red and his tongue was gone. The flesh on his cheeks had been gnawed away. His throat was a red wound.
The stink of vinegar and rotten eggs.
“That’s my dad.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is he dead?”
Frank didn’t answer. He was looking down the road. A group of people were running towards them. He couldn’t see them clearly. He didn’t want to see them clearly. He looked the way the car had come and saw the church tower looming above the houses a few hundred yards away. He remembered the church bells had rung earlier. Maybe someone was there.
The girl was crying.
Frank picked her up and ran down the road. A loose-faced woman wearing a stained cotton nightdress stepped from the darkness. The girl yelped. The woman’s arms trembled and jerked. She stared at the ground and vanished back into the shadows.
He kept running, getting closer to the church; the spired tower tall and dark.
The main gates appeared ahead of them.
Things that were once people screamed and cried behind them. Getting closer.
Frank could feel the girl’s small body shaking against him.
They reached the gates. A row of sentinel-like trees around the graveyard’s periphery, deep shadows beneath them. Frank pushed through the gates onto the stone pathway winding through the graveyard. In the pale moonlight he could make out gravestones jutting from the ground and a war memorial to the men who’d died in both World Wars. The church was darker than the sky. There was light inside, visible through the stained-glass windows. Hope flared inside him.
“We’re nearly there,” Frank whispered.
He stopped.
There were people in the graveyard, mewling and crying to one another amongst the graves. The church’s large, arched double-doors were thirty yards away. They could make it, but what if the doors were locked?
Shapes moved like mourners trying to find the right grave at which to grieve. Frank looked towards the stone pathway and saw a figure on its hands and knees, crawling away from the church. A woman. He would have to get past her.
Frank moved. He kept some distance between them and the woman. She was making a clicking sound in her throat.
They reached the church doors. Frank twisted the ring-shaped metal handle. There was movement to his right; a teenage boy stepped from a pool of shadow into the moonlight. His shoulders were slumped and narrow. His face was a riot of wounds and writhing barbs. Frank opened the door and rushed inside the church. The door shut loudly, but he was just relieved to be inside. They found themselves in a small vestibule.
Frank made sure the main doors were shut tight. There was nothing to push against them. He wondered if they had the wit to open doors.
Candles had been lit. Someone was in here, or had been recently. Frank put the girl down. She looked at the stone floor.
“Stay close,” he whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”
The girl said nothing. Barely a nod of her head.
With the girl following him, Frank walked slowly up the aisle. Absurdly, he thought of his wedding day, years ago. He looked around. Stained glass and saints. Tall stone columns scarred by age. Wooden beams and arches built by men long-dead and buried. The floor radiated a dry cold. Rows of pews. Stained and worn wood, dissected by a long, carpeted aisle leading towards the altar. The air was cold, fetid and old. Dry. Thick enough to snatch handfuls. Their footsteps echoed around the empty spaces. The candles threw shadows like slick-limbed spirits. Frank’s heart jumped at every small sound and whisper of breeze. Inside, he was a riot of fear, nerves and horror.
Churches made Frank nervous. Even on his wedding day he’d been worried about setting foot inside one. All that piousness and judgement. He’d never found a reason to believe in God…or any other god. He needed evidence to believe in something. Due to his father’s gentle encouragement, he stopped believing in Santa Claus and The Tooth Fairy when he was barely seven years old. Father had been a taciturn, honest man and he taught Frank to be pragmatic and sensible in life; that problems could be solved with common sense and simple solutions. His father said once that “dreamers never get anywhere. That’s why so many writers and artists kill themselves”.